


exeunt

by fallenidol_453



Category: Mythica (Movies)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:48:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26936125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallenidol_453/pseuds/fallenidol_453
Summary: Snapshots of Dagen's early life, from birth until he escapes the whorehouse he'd been born in.
Kudos: 2





	exeunt

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Mythica or its characters, all rights belong to Arrowstorm Entertainment. Any mistakes to canon are mine.
> 
> ... and it's not like I had a lot of canon to go on, beyond that 1-4 minute monologue Dagen did about his upbringing in Mythica: The Godslayer.
> 
> Edit, 12/12/2020: Changed some sentences to make the story flow smoother.

Dagen been born on a cold autumn night, in a room crowded with women, to an elf who desperately tried to keep her screams of labor to a minimum.

_“A boy. Least it ain’t a girl.”_

_“The pimp will find a use for him soon enough.”_

_“What should we name him?”_

_“Let the new mother rest, the other kiddies can name him.”_

_“Rest for what, a moonturn? The pimp’s going to want to have her back to work as soon as possible, she’s the only elf in this shithole and brings in the most gold.”_

His mother tunes out the mindless chatter and looks down at her half-breed son. Newly born and tiny, face pinched and ready to scream, sporting her pointed ears. He had resisted just about every potion to induce abortions she’d taken, or maybe they’d just been shittily made. Most of the slop around here was.

Her heart should be swelling with love, but it had shriveled into a dead husk ages ago. This was no place for a baby to grow up.

Still, she draws him to her breast before he can start screaming and gets him to start feeding. The last thing she wanted was for the brothel owner to come up here and discover she’d given birth at last.

&

The pack of children running around underfoot name him Dagen. He’s put to work before he’s cut his first tooth, crawling around the kitchen with a rag tied to his ankle. It doesn’t do much, there’s always debris covering the floor, but it minorly cleans up the newest spills and drips.

Sometimes the old, sour-faced cook sings him to sleep, laying him down in an old box by the kitchen fire. Other times he’s asleep under the bed in his mother’s room, lulled to sleep by the grunts and moans of his mother and the various men who wanted to fuck an elf for a night.

&

Dagen is four when he sees his mother hanging from the doorpost, a soiled bed sheet tied around her neck.

He doesn't understand it, not really. He pushes her leg and she sways like a boneless doll, smelling awful because her bowels emptied down her legs and at her feet.

He doesn't understand it, but the other women do. One of them grabs him and hurriedly hides him in the kitchen, just in time to avoid the pimp who has discovered the body and has started bellowing angrily about _losing his best moneymaker_.

The prostitute who hid him won't look at him in the eye when he asks what happened to his mama. She bullies the cook into giving him the sticky remains of a honey cake that a customer discarded instead, and runs back upstairs in a flurry of split skirts and bare legs without another word.

Dagen learns new words that day nonetheless: Died. Killed herself.

His mama is gone when he's able to go back upstairs. He thinks he sees her body in a ditch a few weeks later, when he's dumping refuse onto the street, but it's so decomposed and covered in dirt that he never really knows.

Her room stays empty for weeks after that, until another elf takes her place.

She's scared and crying most of the time, dressed in clothes that had once been costly. Dagen overhears that she'd been trafficked, whatever that word meant. She's nice to him at first, teaching him some elvish words that are different then the ones his mother said to him, and scaring him into behaving with stories of how the Garun-Dan or Druchii Elves will take away bad children.

But she soon sports the sad eyes and listless gaze he remembers his mother having before she died, and scars appear on her arms. When Dagen had asked about them, as any curious child might, she had given him a hard spank to his backside and sent him away.

He doesn't seek her out again after that, and soon the room is empty again. He heard rumors that she killed herself by _cutting too deep_ or that she escaped into the night with a soldier.

Dagen doesn't believe the escape story; the pimp has a heavy hand over all of them and he uses every rotten trick he has to keep the prostitutes with him. Dagen's overheard the violence the pimp's capable of, and some of the women don't survive his beatings.

When another elf woman occupies the room, he doesn't try to get close to her. It wasn't worth it, trying to get a scrap of affection from someone who was only going to die again.

&

Dagen’s six when he first steals something successfully. The man had been passed out in the common area, slumped over a table with an overturned flagon of watery, cheap ale. Melita had been with him earlier, with her big breasts that all of the customers liked bulging out of her shift, but the man had shoved her away rudely and continued drinking until he’d passed out.

The man’s coin purse just… hung from his belt. Dagen was surprised none of the other kiddies had tried to take it, but the man may have been awake at the time.

That was the first rule of thieving Dagen had learned: always steal when the person was asleep or drunk.

The second rule, one that he had been beaten for until he was black and blue multiple times, was that he should never take the purse. Only what was inside.

He had snuck up to the man unseen and opened the purse. There was barely any coin in there, just a few silver pieces and a couple of coppers. Gold was hard to come by; most rich men didn’t come here. But he’d taken it all anyway, and spent it.

The third rule was to always spend what money you stole. No one can suspect you of thieving coins if you don’t have the evidence on you. Dagen’s quick to leave the brothel and buy food from a rundown stall with his new monies. There’s a little mold on the bottom of the plum pie slice he gets, and the crust is a little stale, but it’s the best thing he’s eaten so far in his life.

&

Dagen’s a preteen now, tall and gangly and looking more human than elf.

He’s too big for the prostitutes to defend if he gets caught stealing, which is rare but it does happen. No amount of the women cajoling _“Oh, he’s just a little boy, he didn’t know any better!”_ won’t work when he’s had his last growth spurt and he stands as tall as the middle-aged Cassia, who looks after the newest crop of children. He’s old enough to get clapped in irons and strung up on a noose like his mother when she killed herself.

There’s the lecherous looks too; it doesn’t matter if he’s a half-breed or a male, patrons look at his ears and think the same fetishistic thoughts they’ve all had about elves. Some of the drunker ones attempt to paw at or grope him, but he’s faster and nimbler than their drunken reflexes and is able to escape their grasps.

It’s time to leave, before he really _is_ hanged for stealing or the aging pimp finds another use for him besides cleaning and serving food. There’s no one who will miss him when he’s gone; most of the prostitutes he remembers growing up have either run away or were dead too soon. Same with the children; most of the ones he grew up with are either dead, working at the brothel, or managed to escape.

He plots carefully over the weeks and months, memorizing the ins and outs of the brothel and the times when it’s most active and inactive. It's not hard to do, having grown up in this building, but he makes himself pay closer attention. He tells no one what he’s doing, lest someone rat him out and he’s beaten for it. The pimp may be aged and diseased, but Dagen still fears the man’s cudgel raining down blows on him mercilessly until he can’t move.

Dagen finally sees his chance one night when he’s twelve. The common area is deserted, there’s no platoons of soldiers staying in the surrounding area and hardly any customers had come by that day. He waits until just about everyone has settled to sleep, and makes his move--

\--well, almost.

Before he leaves the place for good, he sneaks into the pimp’s room as he sleeps and pilfers every valuable thing the man has that he can safely carry unnoticed. Coins, some jewelry, even his beloved cudgel.

 _Then_ he runs away for good.

The coins are enough to buy him some new clothes in a new town, where no one knows his name or face. Dagen pawns almost everything else, spending the coins reaped from those illict trades on better weapons that he barely knows how to use but gets the hang of soon enough.

He runs away again, and again, and again, until his birthplace doesn’t appear on maps anymore.

He keeps running until he comes to face to face with a pretty woman with dark hair in a rickety cart filled with hay, not yet aware of just how much his life is going to change from that single meeting.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure if the Garun-Dan or Druchii that were mentioned in the second film are two separate Elvish races or not, but for the ease and simplicity of this fic, they are.


End file.
